The College Kid Whose Obama Photo Landed in The New Yorker

An article in the current issue of The New Yorker, about what President Obama might accomplish if elected to a second term, appears with a striking, double-page photo of the President standing alone and looking thoughtful. The photo was shot during the G8 summit last month by Luke Sharrett, a student at Western Kentucky University who has taken a break from his final semester in order to shoot on contract for The New York Times for 11 months.

Sent by The Times to cover the G8 summit at the Camp David presidential retreat, Sharrett was among roughly two dozen photographers who had assembled for a photo-op of the President greeting world leaders as they arrived. Sharrett recalls that the President had just walked out of Laurel Lodge, the Camp David conference center, and taken his spot on the edge of the sidewalk. “The first of the leaders hadn’t arrived yet,” he says. “It was an awkward, silent moment. It was kind of an in-between moment, and those are the pictures I enjoy photographing the most. My mentors [New York Times photographers] Stephen Crowley and Doug Mills encourage me to look for something different.”

He had little time to compose his shot, he says. The Marines who oversee Camp David had set strict limits on where, and for how long, the press pool could shoot. “We had to put surgical bags, like surgeons wear on their feet, over our lenses as we went to and from the photo-ops,” Sharrett explains. “They would not let us test, or check the frame until about two minutes before the photo-op, and then we could remove the baggies.” The long, dark shadows in the image were cast by the lights the White House Press Office had set up to the left and right of the press pool. Sharrett liked how his shot came out, but The Times ran other shots he took during the summit, showing other world leaders.

Sharrett, who enrolled at Western Kentucky in 2007, interned in the White House Photo Office in 2008, and in 2009 interned at The New York Times’ Washington bureau for what was supposed to be a three-month stint, but stretched to a year. Finally, he says, Michelle McNally, the paper’s director of photography, told him he had to go back to school. He had almost completed three semesters when, last fall, McNally called again and asked him to work for the Times on contract from January of this year through the election—though he’s still four courses shy of graduating. “I split my time between Capitol Hill, the White House, and I spent some time with [candidate Mitt] Romney; I covered the South Carolina primary. That was a blast.”

During his Times internship he met Elissa Curtis, who is now a photo editor at The New Yorker, and she contacted him when his sports portfolio won honorable mention in the College Photographer of the Year competition last year. When she needed a photo of Obama looking pensive, she called Sharrett. He was on the road with the President at the time, so she asked Redux Pictures, which licenses images by The New York Times photographers, to send a selection. Of the image Curtis chose, she says, “It was one of those [images] where the more I looked at it, the more I liked it.”

Sharrett (who addressed this reporter as “ma’am”) says he is glad an image he had liked is getting a second life, and was “floored” when Curtis told him it would run as a spread. “I’m just really happy to be there, and to make pictures for a living.”

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